Rubber tire fabrication has and still does entail some amount of manual work and inspection. The carcass of the tire is built up before tread and sidewall rubber encases it. Segments of reinforced elastomeric material for the interior plies are eventually placed on a forming drum and joined along adjacent edges. The joining is sometimes called “stitching”. As described by Harsel in U.S. Pat. No. 1,319,333, “stitchers”, as used in the tire-making art, include rotatable wheels or disks to properly lay the plies of a tire carcass. Harsel disclosed a dual-wheel stitcher as an improvement over the single-disk type common at that time. Moscovita disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,909,341 a dual-wheel splicing hand tool for tire building that included a heating mechanism. Schlemmer in U.S. Pat. No. 4,454,000 discloses a motorized tool for joining self-adhesive plies. These aforementioned hand tools did not come with any features to aid applying downward pressure. Also, they pertain to initial construction of tire foundations, and not to repairing flaws discovered subsequently.